Eclipse dims the lights on Twin Lakes Area viewers

Haze, cooler temps but no nightfall

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Sky watchers use solar eclipse glasses and a pair of binoculars with a solar filter to look at the sun Monday at the Donald W. Reynolds Library in Mountain Home.(Photo: Scott Liles/The Baxter Bulletin)Buy Photo

The Great American Eclipse — the first total solar eclipse to sweep the U.S. coast-to-coast in nearly a century — left Twin Lakes Area sky watchers looking at a dimmed haze midday Monday.

Viewers in the eclipse’s “path of totality” — the 67-mile-wide area in which the moon’s shadow sweeps across the Earth — watched as daylight turned to nightfall as the moon covered the sun briefly Monday afternoon.

Monday’s eclipse path ran through parts of Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and South Carolina. Viewers not in the path of totality saw a partial eclipse, in which part of the sun is blocked by the moon.

Mountain Home viewers saw an eclipse with about 94 percent of the sun’s light blocked. It began at 11:46 a.m. locally and was over by 2:44 p.m. At the peak of the eclipse, about 1:16 p.m., the sky dimmed slightly, the temperature dropped noticeably and a late afternoon-like haze appeared the in sky.

“I’ve seen some eclipses where you have just 1 percent of unobstructed light, and it’s still daylight,” professional photographer and amateur astronomer Jerry Wilcoxen said. “That 1 percent has just so much photons; it has to be zero percent for total darkness and the birds to roost.”

More than 50 people watched the eclipse outside of the Donald W. Reynolds Library, with many passing around plastic-framed solar eclipse viewers on loan from the library.

“I was glad people shared the glasses,” said Cleo Holm, who attended the library’s watch party Monday. “This was a really great experience.”

Monday’s weather was muggy with puffs of white clouds dotting the sky. Several times during the eclipse the sun disappeared behind a cloud, confusing viewers trying to locate the sun through the ultra-dark eclipse glasses.

The Earth, moon and sun line up for a solar eclipse on average about every 18 months, but most of those events occur over the ocean or at the Earth’s poles. Monday’s eclipse was the first of the social-media era to sweep through such a densely populated area.

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Coralie Lawrence uses a set of solar eclipse viewers to look at the sun Monday at the Donald W. Reynolds Library in Mountain Home.(Photo: Scott Liles/The Baxter Bulletin)

The moon hasn’t thrown this much shade at the U.S. since 1918, during the nation’s last coast-to-coast total eclipse. The last total solar eclipse on the U.S. was in 1979, but only five states in the Northwest experienced total darkness.

The next total solar eclipse here in the U.S. will be on April 8, 2024, which will be visible from Texas to New England. More total eclipses in the U.S. will follow in 2044, 2045 and 2078. In other parts of the world, the next total solar eclipse will be visible in Chile and Argentina on July 2, 2019.